An enjoyable basketball book even for those who aren’t hoops aficionados.
In Brundage’s novel, a 21-year-old basketball player earns success and learns valuable life lessons.
DJ Joyner is a college basketball phenomenon as a point guard but not good enough for the NBA draft. He then competes in the NBA’s Summer League, playing for the Washington Wizards and hoping for a permanent spot. He hangs on and succeeds, but his position on the team is still precarious. Then a mystery man shows up who goes by the name Marion Lake; he’s also known as The Invisible Hand—a basketball trainer with a legendary reputation. Someone equally mysterious has sponsored DJ, paying Lake’s fees, and the training regimen becomes truly brutal. DJ is willing to let his training consume him, even to the point where it threatens his relationship with WNBA player Shanice Barton. His determination pays off: DJ was good, but now he’s better. Success follows success, and it becomes clear that someday he, too, may be someone’s mysterious benefactor—and a superstar. This is an unabashedly heartwarming story. Brundage is a former basketball player himself and is now a successful motivational speaker and the author of the self-help book Shoot Your Shot (2018). This novel is clearly meant to illustrate his motivational philosophy, with passages such as “He had allowed envy and his wounded ego to dictate his actions, fogging his outlook,” but it does make for a feel-good read. Those who follow basketball may be more familiar with the technical basketball terminology and jargon than nonfans will be, but the author often provides helpful context. Still, the prose is often infused with sportswriting overkill, as when a basketball is said to have “voyaged to the hoop” or “the rotating sphere descended to the rim.” On the other hand, Brundage has a gift for describing the second-by-second drama of gameplay; he knows how to get readers on the edges of their (stadium) seats as the game clock relentlessly ticks down and players execute split-second plays.
An enjoyable basketball book even for those who aren’t hoops aficionados.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798987956007
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Green Hill Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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